The U.S. Air Force Wants Your Small Business

The Air Force is looking to small businesses to beef up competition between potential vendors, and to provide more innovation, the officials said. “We don’t have enough competition now,” says David Van Buren, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for Acquisitions. “Growing these innovative small businesses will help us rectify that by increasing the industrial base.”

According to the article, which ran in an Air Force publication, the Air Force currently books about $9 billion in annual business with small companies – a figure that hasn’t budged much in recent years. Growing that number, the officials said, will mean moving past hiring small companies to sweep the floors. It means relying on them for engineering and technology.